Study reveals Germans' favourite emoji

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Emoji have become part of everyone's daily lives, whether they're crucial signifiers of meaning or indecipherable symbols on your teenage granddaughter's mobile phone. A new study shows which ones Germans love the most.

SwiftKey, a company that offers a keyboard app for smartphones, collects user data so as to predict what you're most likely to type next and save you time by getting there first – as long as it gets it right.

But the billions of data points they have about how people used emoji in their conversations are also a prime source of information on different countries' styles of communicating in the 21st Century.

“We found that the French really are among the most romantic – they use hearts four times more than other nationalities,” SwiftKey spokeswoman Ruth Barnett told The Local. “Germany, Italy, and the UK all seem to prefer smiley faces to hearts."

“German speakers also like sharing pizza emoji more than lollipops," Barnett added.

But Barnett concludes that the world's love of the basic set of smiley faces reveals how much we have in common.

“Smiley faces tend to be popular across the board and significantly outnumber the use of sad smileys,” she said.

And what emoji was absolute top of the list for Germany? The ear-to-ear grin crying with laughter.